


Pride

by obsidiangrey



Series: States 'Verse [12]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Bisexual Character, Everyone Is Gay, Family, Family Dynamics, Gay Character, Genderqueer Character, Lesbian Character, Multi, Polyamory, Pride Parades, or rather everyone is queer, some part of the lgbt community
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 00:03:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14841746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obsidiangrey/pseuds/obsidiangrey
Summary: It wasn’t until the end of ‘99, nearly seventy years after they had finally gotten together, that they told their family they were dating – and fully intended on getting married, when such a thing was legal.In retrospect, Christmas dinner might not have been the best time for that.





	Pride

It took decades for both Massachusetts and New York to come to terms with themselves, and decades more to trust one another enough to start feeling out the boundaries of a relationship. But even then-- well, laws, and Stonewall, and Harvey Milk, and the current administration (applicable to numerous Presidents at numerous points), those insecurities and fears were always at the forefronts of their minds. It wasn’t until the end of ‘99, nearly seventy years after they had finally gotten together, that they told their family they were dating – and fully intended on getting married, when such a thing was legal.

In retrospect, Christmas dinner might not have been the best time for that.

Half the table nearly rioted. The other half had figured out that the two were dating years ago and tried to quell the outbursts. Washington District downed the wine remaining in her glass and reached for the bottle. Massachusetts held onto New York’s hand so tightly that they could both feel something crack-- but they saw their father get up, and they watched him walk over. He pulled them into a hug, warm and safe and familiar. Pulled back enough to grin, all three of them a little bit misty-eyed.

“I’m proud of you two. And I love you both.”

New York managed to crack a smile. His voice cracked, too, but no one mentioned it. “Thanks, Pops.”

* * *

Washington District was far from unemotional. It was only that, in a man’s world, in a political world, (in a political world dominated by men), she had gotten very good at keeping her feelings under lock and key just in order to be taken seriously. She laughed, and smiled, and cried, and grew frustrated, and grew furious. But between the relatively Puritan upbringing of the family and her relative isolation from both other Nations and a number of the other States, she didn’t notice the things that she _didn’t_ feel simply because she never thought about them.

Well--

\---it wasn’t like _not_ feeling sexually attracted to anyone really _mattered_ , not to her. She was a personification whose existence was only known to a few outside her family, and she didn’t have a lot of options had she even wanted them in the first place. It was fine. Quite fine.

(Asexual, was the word she found eventually, and it was almost a startling relief to finally have a definition, a tension she hadn’t even recognized easing away.)

She came out to a handful of others, eventually, Georgia, her father, Louisiana-- Massachusetts, and New York, since while they weren’t the first to come out, they were the first to do so to everyone. She never went to Pride, not wanting to deal with the headache that most of her politicians would become if they knew where she was, but that really _was_ fine. She had a word, and a definition, and people who supported her, and that was more than enough.

* * *

Virginia had always been a set of walking contradictions, and she was well aware of it. She had worn trousers to the Second Continental Congress the day the Declaration of Independence had been signed, but she had also, for a number of decades, turned her nose up at every progressive movement promoted by the people, even her own.

She was getting better at not doing that. It was just a slow kind of process.

She had worn trousers to the Second Constitutional Convention the day the Declaration of Independence had been signed. The words like _daughter_ and _woman_ and _girl_ had never seemed to feel right when they were applied to her, for reasons she couldn’t understand, crawling underneath her skin like barbs and sticking there. And then, after four years of being forced to fight under a man’s name in a man’s uniform in a hellish war she wanted little part of, words like _sir_ and _man_ and _boy_ had felt even worse. _Non-binary_ wasn’t a word that existed for centuries of her life.

Neither was _polyamory_ \-- she knew it as polygamy, which she knew as the reason why Utah was denied entry into the Union for so long, the heretics.

Neither was _gay_ \-- she knew it as homosexual, or sodomite, which was a crime, and a sin besides.

Someday, centuries after her father had found her wandering Virginian soil and had given her some of his old clothes to wear in place of her rags (a shirt and a pair of trousers and a pair of little little shoes), she would be lying in her bed in Richmond with the first pale light of dawn creeping through the windows, Maryland mumbling half-asleep words into her shoulders, and Delaware’s head on her chest. _Someday_. Getting there wouldn’t be easy, but she could – and would – do it.

* * *

“Pa,” said Maryland.

“Mary,” said America, cheerfully bustling about the kitchen, making breakfast for the two of them. He had stayed at her house last night, needing to fly out later today for a conference in France, and for whatever reason had insisted that he should be the one to cook. Normally, she would argue the absurdity of that, but she was fairly certain her hands were shaking too much for her to manage anything edible.

“Pa, I’m dating Delaney.”

Her father hummed an acknowledgment, still quite cheerful-- Maryland wiped her sweaty palms on the fabric of her pants and sucked in a sharp breath.

“ _And_ Elizabeth. The three of us. Are dating.”

“Yep,” her father agreed. “You don’t need to sound so surprised about it, kiddo, you know that they love you to bits.”

Maryland took a moment to process. Then she took a couple more.

“You _knew_?!”

 _Now_ he stopped, turning fully to face her; his confusion shifted into something kinder, and he left the stove top behind to pull her into a hug. “Hey. Hey, now-- it’s okay. You don’t need to be scared. I love you to bits too, kiddo, nothing’s going to change that.”

“Wasn’t scared,” she mumbled into his jacket, lying through her teeth. “How’d you know?”

“You’d all been dancing around one another for years, and then you weren’t. Stopped.” He chuckled, a quiet sound she could hear vibrating in his chest. “’Sides, I’m your dad. Known you for ages. I’m very good at noticing things.”

“...Pa.”

“Mm?”

“The eggs are burning, Pa.”

“Shit.”

* * *

“Men are unfairly attractive.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

There was a pause, in which Louisiana and Tennessee both sat on the couch of their family’s living room in silence. Then the both of them turned to look at one another, wide-eyed, speaking in unison:

“ _Wait_ a minute--!”

* * *

His older sister – his eastern half, once, but Virginia hadn’t been his eastern half for a long time now – had worn trousers to see the Declaration of Independence signed. West Virginia had heard the story a bunch of times. He’d also heard the stories his sister had never told other people – how much she hated skirts and dresses and how they made her want to crawl out of her own skin.

After the war: how she hated her hair cut so short but how the thought of growing it long again made her feel sick.

And much, much later, when they both had words to go along with the way they felt about things: how relieved she felt for the first time in a very long time. Perhaps the first time ever.

West Virginia, like his sister, hadn’t had words to describe himself for a long time. It was a little bit easier for him than it was for her, his bisexual, genderqueer sister who only had a sense of _wrongness._ He’d just _known_. When his sister had found him, a scrappy little thing wandering down the Shenandoah River in a stolen shirt so big it might as well have been a smock, he’d looked her right in the eye and asked if she was the Land like him. She’d said yes. Then he’d asked if that made him her brother, and she’d say yes to that, too.

It wasn’t until she tried to give him a bath that she realized he wasn’t. Or, he was, but his body wasn’t a boy’s body, and because neither of them had a word for _transgender_ yet they had argued about it, _you’re not a boy, you’ve-- my name’s Gideon and I_ _ **am**_ _a boy, why am I not a boy?_

She’d seen something in him that she saw in herself. So she sat him down and told him that he couldn’t ever, ever tell anyone, and she cut his hair, and gave him her clothes from when she was little. When he was older – after the war, after a lot of things had changed – she taught him how to bind his chest without hurting himself.

Even after they were no longer Virginia, when his land was really _his_ land and not _theirs_ , West and East, they were still siblings. He’d never really told her how grateful he was – for this, for _so much_ – but he thought she knew anyway. Big sisters knew things like that.

* * *

“I’m _not_ saying you can’t be punk, _punk_ , I’m just saying that if you’re going to wear leather pants and that to a pride parade in _June_ you gotta deal with shit like chafing, and _hydrate_ , for the love of God, if I have to carry your queer ass into the shade because you pass out I swear--”

“--talking like I haven’t _been_ to a parade before, asshole, now get down here so I can _fight_ you, just ‘cause you’re taller than I am by a foot and a half--”

“Seven inches isn’t a foot and a half, Robert--”

Massachusetts was laughing too hard to breathe, having already fallen off the couch and onto the floor of his husband’s apartment. New York and Rhode Island continued bickering for nearly ten minutes afterward.

* * *

“Say, you think those east coasters are ever gonna invite _us_ to one of their parades?”

California made a face from where she was sitting, sipping lemonade through a straw, rainbow ribbon tying her hair back into a ponytail and colorful stripes painted on her cheeks. She was wearing a massive pair of sunglasses and a flowery dress, all equally colorful. Washington and Oregon were decked out similarly.

“Why would we need to go over there?” she asked with a derisive sniff. “New York’s where it _started_ , sure, but LA Pride started at the same time. Besides, every time we go west you complain about how you don’t like being away from your land.”

“Which is dumb,” Oregon added. “’Cause you never shut up about your kids in the ‘36 Olympics, and you went _with_ them.”

“Shh. You’re being homophobic.”

“What, ‘cause you know I’m right and you don’t like it?”

“Yep.”

California rolled her eyes (though neither of them could see it) and turned her attention back to the crowds. The parade would be starting soon, and she would have to corral them both into somewhere they’d actually be able to _see_ it.

* * *

America didn’t bother to go and look for the cause of the chaos as he heard a wave of noise from one of the floors below him. The family house was usually loud, and given that they were celebrating the June birthdays this weekend, it was _especially_ loud.

That, and June was Pride Month. There were a bunch of his kids that took it as an opportunity to be more over-the-top than they normally were, and that was fine by him. If it meant they were happy… if it meant they felt _safe…_

He always hoped that he made his kids feel safe around them. He never wanted them to feel _scared_ of him, God, no-- but there was something about being part of an unspoken minority for so long that made them feel scared to talk about it. Not just to him, but to anyone, to each other, even. Now, though they and their people still had a lot of work to do, though they were still sometimes scared (and he hated that, hated even more that there wasn’t anything he could do about it), _now_ they had a time that they could be proud of who they were. Something meant just for _them_.

As a father, he couldn’t really ask for anything more.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Pride Month, all!!
> 
> Massachusetts / Patrick: cisgender gay male  
> New York / Steven: cisgender gay male  
> Washington DC / Abigail: cisgender asexual female  
> Virginia / Elizabeth: genderqueer bisexual, she/her (occasionally they/them) pronouns  
> Maryland / Mary: cisgender lesbian female  
> Delaware / Delaney: genderfluid lesbian, she/her and they/them  
> Louisiana / Lou: cisgender bisexual male  
> Tennessee / Timothy: cisgender gay male  
> West Virginia / Gideon: transgender pansexual male  
> Rhode Island / Robert: doesn't identify himself beyond "queer" in both gender and sexuality, he/him  
> California / Angelita: cisgender lesbian
> 
> Don't have any sexuality/gender headcanons for Washington state (George) and Oregon (Oliver), but the two of them + California, while they wouldn't otherwise be close, bond over being so far removed from the east coast and occasionally get salty about being ignored by them.
> 
> Other state ocs who are probably LGBT but I haven't developed them enough to get a good grasp on their character: Pennsylvania/Betsy, New Jersey/James, New Hampshire/Jacob (he does the fireworks for pride parades in his cities when he gets the chance), Maine/Mason, Georgia/Belle, Florida/Carlotta. Probably others. Most of the characters I write wind up being LGBT one way or another, at some point........
> 
> Anyway. Thank you as always for reading, and I hope you enjoyed! Comments and kudos are much appreciated.


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